Cori Giroux doesn’t eat meat. Lots of visitors to her family’s sugar house do, though, so she made sure to stock up on hot dogs cooked in maple syrup for last week’s Maple Open House Weekend.

Giroux bought 72 hot dogs that she thought would last the entire weekend of the statewide event celebrating the annual maple-syrup crop. She ran out of those after the first day Saturday, so she rushed out to buy another 108 hot dogs for Sunday’s crowds.

“People like it,” Giroux said Sunday as she readied yet another hot dog for a customer at Mountainview Mapleworks at the Giroux Family Farm in Richmond, which she runs with her husband, Jim Giroux. “Hot dogs might not be the healthiest food, but when you put them in maple syrup they get healthier.”

Giroux was joking, of course – few diet books base their theories for good health on frankfurters and sugar – but if you’re talking mental health, there aren’t too many foods that’ll make a person happier than hot dogs immersed in maple syrup. Giroux and others around the state offered maple-flavored hot dogs as some of the many sweet treats available on Maple Open House Weekend.

“We only do the hot dogs on special weekends like this,” said Paul Palmer, who with his wife, Colleen Palmer, runs Palmer Lane Maple in Jericho, a business that sells a variety of maple-related foods. “It’s really to show how versatile maple is.”

History of maple dogs

Maple-flavored hot dogs are rooted in the tradition of family sugarhouses.

Palmer, whose cousins are involved in Palmer’s Sugarhouse in Shelburne, said he grew up eating sweetened hot dogs, which once upon a time were cooked by sugar makers in sap pans where the meat soaked up the flavor. Modern safety regulations discourage that, according to Palmer.

“Possible food allergies – there’s beef, pork, other things in a hot dog that is not necessarily a good thing for maple syrup,” Palmer said. “There’s very little of it that would end up in the finished product, but it’s still a food allergen and we didn’t want to cross-contaminate any of the syrup that Vermont is well known for with any of the other products.”

The finished maple syrup works just fine in enhancing the flavor of a hot dog. “I love them,” said Palmer, who puts the hot dogs in a thin layer of maple syrup in a frying pan, which has the effect of caramelizing the syrup. “I like the salt and the sweet.”

Cori Giroux served her maple-soaked hot dogs out of a crock pot on a table just outside the farm’s sugarhouse. Some customers are slightly baffled by maple hot dogs, according to Giroux. “Do we put ketchup and mustard on or don’t we?” she said visitors ask.

Rory Cardinal of Jericho had a hot dog Sunday at the Giroux farm. His 15-month-old daughter, Matilda, munched happily on what was left as her father gave his quick food review.

“It’s very good,” Cardinal said of the maple hot dog. “It’s definitely sweeter.” He said he tempered the maple flavor a bit by putting ketchup on the hot dog.

Giroux, whose family only sells hot dogs on Maple Open House Weekend, said the franks have been “crazy popular” since she began offering them a few years ago. The hot dogs are a curiosity for visitors who come to the sugar house off Kenyon Road to browse more-traditional fare such as doughnuts, cookies, maple cream, maple candy and sugar on snow.